The Safety Differently Professional

One of the missing pieces in our theory and research on safety differently has been what it means for the role of safety professionals and practitioners.  For all of the advances we have made in understanding the role of managers and front-line workers, we have left the safety practitioners to their own devices to work through what it might mean for them.  Following the Columbia Space Shuttle accident in 2003 Professor David Woods published a paper which was later included as a chapter in the first Resilience Engineering text book and titled “How to design a safety organisation: A test case for resilience engineering”.  In 2017, during the PhD research of David Provan into the current and future roles of safety professionals, David and David collaborated with Professor Sidney Dekker and Dr Drew Rae to define more fulsomely the purpose, tasks and activities of a “Safety Differently Professional” role within an organisation.  This article is open access courtesy of www.forgeworks.com